User Reviews

***SPOILERS*** It's very probably the studios making the Airport movies in the 1970's got one of their bright ideas from this "Kraft Suspesnse Theater" episode. In Which it has co-pilot Let. John Corby,Martin Milner, put his skills to use under the most trying and dangerous of circumstances possible. Let Corby feeling that he doesn't quite have the stuff to be a first rate USAF pilot is satisfied to play second string as co-pilot and let his boss, the pilot, do the flying. This outrages the head of March Airport Base the General,Leif Erickson, who feels that Colby is just a lazy good for nothing bum who shirks responsibility at every turn. The General in fact wants to kick Corby out of the service but sill thinks that there's still some hope in him. That hope soon comes out a trans-Atlantic flight on a B-47 bomber that the plane's pilot Maj. Dawson, Richard Long, ends up unconscious where there's an on air explosion in the plane's cockpit.

With no one on board to fly the B-47 it's now up to the scared down to his boots and almost wetting his flight suite Let.Corby to get the plane safely to base at far off Goose Bay. This is quite a job for Let.Corby in that the plane's navigation or radar system was knocked out in the explosion and he now,due to the explosion, has only 1 hour of flue to make the trip to Goose Bay that will needs at least twice that much for him to make it successfully! Knowing that it's now or never Let. Corby handles the B-47 like a champ but what he's up against even the most experience USAF bomber pilot would find very difficult if not impossible to pull off.

***SPOILERS*** Nail biting suspense that has Let. Corby doing his best to get his crippled and almost out of flue B-47 to rendezvous with a tanker plane and re-fuel in mid-flight. Or else end up together with his crew at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It's in fact the injured pilot Maj. Dawson who almost screwed everything up for the desperate to get his B-47 fueled up Let.Corby. With the out cold Maj.Dawson regaining conscious and thinking that he's still in charge he almost got Let.Corby to lose his concentration in having his plane refueled by trying,in his very unstable condition,to refuel it himself!

I's Let.Corby's steel nerves more then anything else that got him and his crew out of the jam that they found themselves in 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. And in successfully refueling and landing his plane Let.Corby gained the respect of all those ,including the General, who thought that he didn't quite have it as an USAF bomber pilot. And it was that life and death situation that Let.Corby found himself in up in the wild blue yonder that made that all possible.

Martin Milner stars as Lt. Corby--a co-pilot of a B-47 for Strategic Air Command. Oddly, after serving in this capacity, he's never tried for advancement, as most co-pilots apparently strive to become pilots. But there's something about Corby's psyche...he loves to fly but is afraid of all the responsibility placed on the guy in command. However, this is tested during a flight across the Atlantic. The pilot is severely injured and might die--and it's up to Corby to not only take command but get them down safely as soon as possible. This is made worse by their need to refuel--and there is little time to spare if he doesn't get it right the first time.

The film is pretty much exactly as I describe it and everyone does a decent job in the show. My only complaint is that the ending just seemed like a foregone conclusion--there just wasn't any doubt that he'd pull through when the chips were down, so to speak.

Caught the second half or so of this episode on RTV tonight. Hadn't seen the series at all before so I looked it up on RTV's website first, and then Wikipedia before coming here.

"Streetcar" is a U.S. Air Force bomber jet on patrol over the ocean when the situation goes haywire. The pilot is incapacitated; the navigator has gotten off course, and it's up to a young and insecure co-pilot to save the day. Can he re-establish contact with home base, find the tanker plane sent in search for him, and get the plane refueled before it falls into the sea and is lost for good? This is a typical presentation of the times when the Pentagon was eager to show off the Air Force's multi-million-dollar hardware and so we have plentiful color footage of the B-47 bomber and KC-135 tanker jets. The casting is good and the production values are close to feature-film quality (which is better than normal for the era). The writing, however, is fairly standard for the times. I call it "military procedural" (as opposed to "police procedural") in which the armed services are presented in the kinds of crises that "happen once in a while, but we have the means to handle them because of the capable people we recruit". I've seen this repeated a dozen different places, some better and some worse than shown here.

I, too, caught the last half of this program on Seattle's RTV. Since I had never seen this program before I thought, at first, I was watching, "A Gathering of Eagles". Than I recognized Martin Milner. I agree the production values were high and it was filmed in color. I also recognized the field where they land at the end of the program as the former SAC Base at March AFB in Riverside, CA. This show must have been great PR for SAC and the Air Force. But more importantly, its now a good historical piece. The acting was good and there were plenty of now vintage aircraft on the parking ramp - B-47s, C-47s, C-97s - all aircraft that have long since been retired. A bit of nostalgia since I spent a lot of time there in the early 1970s with the Civil Air Patrol.